Reader,
can you find rest apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then be assured that
your religion is vain. Are you satisfied with anything short of a
conscious knowledge of your union and interest in Christ? Then woe unto
you. If you profess to be a Christian, yet find full satisfaction in
worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is false. If your soul
can stretch herself at rest, and find her bed long enough, and the
coverlet broad enough to cover her in the chambers of sin, then you are
a hypocrite, and far enough from any right thoughts of Christ or
perception of His preciousness. But if, on the other hand, you feel that
if you could indulge in sin without punishment, yet it would be a
punishment if itself; and that if you could have the whole world, and
abide in it for ever, it would be quite enough misery not to be parted
from it; for your God – your God – is what your soul craves after;
then be of good courage, thou are a child of God. With all thy sins and
imperfections, take this to thy comfort: if thy soul has no rest in sin,
thou are not as the sinner is! If thou are still crying after and
craving after something better, Christ has not forgotten thee, for thou
hast not quite forgotten Him. The believer cannot do without his Lord;
words are inadequate to express his thoughts of Him. We cannot live on
the sands of the wilderness, we want the manna which drops from on high;
out skin bottles of creature confidence cannot yield us a drop of
moisture, but we drink of the rock which follows us, and that rock is
Christ. When you feed on Him your soul can sing, “He hath satisfied my
mouth with good things, so that my youth is renewed like the
eagle’s,” but if you have Him not, your bursting wine vat and
well-filled barn can give you no sort of satisfaction: rather lament
over them in the words of wisdom, “Vanity of vanities, all is
vanity!”